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8/4/2019 Graduation Rate 2

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Graduation Rate When college presidents and other higher education leaders talk

about federal policy these days, the most common theme is dismay

at proposed new regulations from the Department of Education.

But a close second is the inadequacy of data from the Education

Departments Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

(IPEDS)for evaluating anything.

This is a problem that has vexed us for years, and it's time for

us to do something about it.

Every sector is affected. Colleges with many students

transferring out to other colleges complain that even when those

men and women graduate from the second institution, they still

count as failures for their first college.

Universities with large numbers of entering transfer students

know that even when they graduate they will not count as

successes anywhere in IPEDS accounting. Juniors entering with

degrees from community colleges will not help the statistics of

their new university when they receive a B.A. or B.S.

Colleges with large percentages of part-time and commuter

students know that they normally take longer than six years to

graduate. Everyone reminds each other that a large percentage of

Americans graduating from college now have credits from more


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than one institution, often more than two institutions. Many

people taking courses at community colleges do not intend to

complete degree programs.

Yet six-year graduation rates from the first point of entry are

the only figures we seem to have for evaluating completion

success. IPEDS data are not useful for management purposes, but

they can be outright dangerous for policy making, particularly

if leading to conclusions that whole segments of our country can

be written off as not college-worthy. The figures are least

reliable for low-income populations who do have to stop out

some semesters, who are more likely to attend part time, more

likely to need time for pre-college courses because of weak high

schools, more likely to transfer, and more at risk.

So, rather than leaving this for the U.S. Department of

Education to fix, I am challenging colleagues in higher

education to design an alternative system that is more valid,

reliable, and useful.

My institution, Heritage University, in the Yakima Valley of

Washington, is one of the institutions fully committed to

creating opportunities for a regions underserved, low -income,

largely minority and almost entirely first-generation-college

population that, by and large, has not been well-prepared by

local high schools. Until my arrival last summer, Heritages


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founding and only president, Kathleen Ross, had for 28 years

been building an inspirational learning environment with

thousands of success stories from that population. Many of those

graduates are not only productive citizens but also leaders in

the Pacific Northwest, reaching goals no one would have imagined

possible for them before they came to Heritage.

Most Heritage students, to be sure, do need pre-college

developmental work; almost all have to hold jobs; many have to

stop out for a semester from time to time. Some 70 percent are

women, many of them single parents determined to raise their

families up out of poverty. Graduation figures in the IPEDS data

for those who entered at the start of the last decade look

miserable at first glance, something like 18 percent in six

years. A certain portion of that deficiency derives from

Heritage having had in its early years an enrollment policy a

bit too close to open enrollment for a college with high

standards.

The history of Heritage has been, in effect, a search to

understand which students can be remediated to do rigorous

college work and which, despite a high school diploma and a

respectable grade point average, lack the academic skills and

work ethic to succeed. As a consequence Heritage, now with much

time-tested data at its disposal, is advising a number of


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applicants in other directions; is developing stronger pre-

college modules for those with ability and commitment to

succeed; and is investing in robust advising to complement

academic rigor.

One might hope that Rich Vedder, who in a recent Forbes blog

post suggested Heritage might best be shut down for wasting Pell

Grant dollars, would reconsider that conclusion and decide that

Heritage is actually a very good Pell investment in Americas

future.

For if he and others study the data more closely, they'll also

learn that of those students who actually matriculated as full-

fledged freshmen between 2003 and 2005 -- that is, students who

had completed any necessary remedial work -- the 8-year

graduation rate was 41 percent, not including those who

transferred to another college. Of those who successfully became

sophomores at Heritage, the graduation rate was 81 percent. Of

those who became juniors, as well as those who transferred in as

juniors from community colleges, the graduation rate was 81

percent. In each of those last three data sets, Heritage

University compares quite favorably with other colleges that

have comparable populations. Hundreds of other colleges,

moreover, have good stories to tell if they can use metrics that
http://blogs.forbes.com/ccap/2011/03/07/for-whom-the-pell-tolls/http://blogs.forbes.com/ccap/2011/03/07/for-whom-the-pell-tolls/http://blogs.forbes.com/ccap/2011/03/07/for-whom-the-pell-tolls/http://blogs.forbes.com/ccap/2011/03/07/for-whom-the-pell-tolls/


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are truer to and more relevant to actual performance than are

the IPEDS data.

So Heritage is now developing a metric to assign to every

entering student -- based on credits transferred, remediation

needed, and planned full-time or part-time schedule -- a

predictive graduation date, a benchmark against which success

can be measured, with a factor also to account for those known

to have transferred to another college.

This is the time, however, to challenge all of us in higher

education -- the presidential associations, those who oversee

accreditation, and other higher education organizations -- to

come together to propose an alternative to IPEDS, or at least a

parallel system, that colleges and universities themselves find

useful for management and that policy makers can trust.

It must account for transfer patterns, for differential rates of

progress among low-income populations, for developmental needs

of students, and for the wide array of kinds of institutions in

American higher education. It is complex but it is doable. It

will give all of us a better system for measuring completion

success rates.

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